Communities

IET Communities provide like-minded people with opportunities to share ideas, collaborate, learn and network. With more than 100 Local and Technical Networks around the world, you can feel confident of finding a community that suits your interests.

These threads are a considerable annoyance, but we have to move carefully on counter-measures, because anything we can reasonably do is also likely to affect genuine contributors and their postings. As you know, there are already some measures in place to prevent the forum from being spammed with links.

We are continuing to monitor the forums over the holiday period and will remove spam messages/threads, as usual. Please do flag them to the moderators as well, in case we miss any; we have said on a number of occasions that we cannot read every thread.

Spam is as unwelcome to the IET as site operator as it is to the users; most importantly, it undermines the forum, but it also of course conflicts with our genuine paid advertising, which appears in the form of banners and so on.

Season's greetings to all our contributors.

-------------------------
David RossallThe Institution of Engineering and Technology

At the risk of attempting to educate a female ancestor in the vacuum-emptying of shelled ova, have you started forwarding whatever information is available at your end to misuse@fasthosts.co.uk as requested in Fasthosts' page on reporting abuse of their systems? (A quick 'whois' tells me Fasthosts are their ISP. A quick Google tells me this appears to be their normal marketing technique.)

It looks as though their site has been taken down - at any rate, at the time of writing, it is not accessible. I agree that Googling their phone number suggests that they are doing this all over the place.

However, the actual spam is coming not from Fasthosts but from a range of far eastern IP addresses, so our kitchen providers may have employed some agency to attack all the forums that Google shows. I'm not confident that following up that angle is going to be worthwhile.

We'll consider installing alternative counter-measures, assuming that this continues. Obviously, we'll also be continuing to take the threads down.

Regards

-------------------------
David RossallThe Institution of Engineering and Technology

As of this morning there are another 10 of these posts added today, 2 in "Wiring and regulations", 3 in Design and production, 3 in General technical Discussions and 2 in this forum. These are in addition to the 7 added on 5th January which are still on the forum.

If there is no legislation in place can we look at disciplining any IET members who are employed in this company?

This is now getting beyond a joke and I believe it is time to take a fimer stand against this particular company. Maybe using a sticky in each forum to advise against dealing with them until this spamming stops.

We are continuing to manage these postings (so the ones referred to by Clive have already been removed). As I mentioned in my previous posting, a Google search suggests that other fora are being "attacked" similarly; some are managing the problem (because the posts indexed by Google have disappeared by the time that I get round to looking at them), and others are not (the posts are still there after some time).

There is no evidence that IET members are involved with this company. The postings always come from new registrants, who of course get banned for breach of the conditions of use, but realistically there is little that a forum operator can do to prevent an individual from registering again with a different user name (and getting banned again).

We are working on the problem, but obviously I am not going to state in open forum, for the perpetrators to read, what we may or may not do, any more than I am going to catalogue our existing counter-measures.

Regards

-------------------------
David RossallThe Institution of Engineering and Technology

I wouldn't assume it's just bots. Labour rates in parts of the far East are so low that you can just outsource spamming. That way, the usual tricks such as captchas can easily be bypassed.

But even the cheapest labour in the world can't get round what some fora use - a system where all of a new user's posts are moderated until they have posted a set number of posts that are accepted by forum moderators.

If I, who have never been a forum moderator, know this, then the people who run these fora ...

At present, the forum software allows either all posts to be moderated, or none. We have taken the view that moderating all posts, in order to eliminate a few kitchen salesmen, would be difficult to sustain and, more importantly, would discourage the free flow of discussions. We could not easily guarantee to respond to all posts quickly.

Regards

-------------------------
David RossallThe Institution of Engineering and Technology